


Grace Coming Out of the Void

by umadoshi (Ysabet)



Category: Newsflesh Trilogy - Mira Grant
Genre: Adopted Sibling Incest, Christmas, F/M, Mistletoe, POV Alternating, POV First Person, Pre-Canon, Unresolved Sexual Tension, no series spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 05:39:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8956618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ysabet/pseuds/umadoshi
Summary: Glimpses of the Christmas when Georgia and Shaun were fifteen and the Christmas when they were sixteen.
A lot can change in a year.





	

**Author's Note:**

> \--Title from Vienna Teng's "The Atheist Christmas Carol"
> 
> \--Beta work by wildpear

************  
December 2032  
************

Christmas when George and I were fifteen was the second-worst we ever had at home with the Masons. The two of us were doing all we could to tune out the half-acknowledged, gut-droppingly electric sexual tension between us, so we were snotty with our parents and snarky with each other. Everything about our relationship was smoldering, all annoyance and desire; staying half-pissed at each other didn't kill or even subdue our interest in touching each other, but it made it a little easier to resist.

It also meant Mom and Dad were constantly having to choose between letting the world see how sullenly adolescent we were or minimizing our image in their domestic-life blog posts, which was a mixed blessing. Dad just used way less footage of us--not that he ever used nearly as much as Mom--and Mom fluctuated between leaving us alone and filming us constantly to catch any moments of pleasantness.

By Christmas Eve, she was acting like she was possessed, snapping back and forth between stage-managing us to death and pasting on extra-glittery, manic smiles for the camera. Usually when she got like that, George and I boggled over how no one but us ever seemed to realize how fake it all was, but for once we knew: Mom was wearing a Santa hat, much to George's horror, and a Santa hat makes anyone wearing it look either totally sincere or totally plastic. Most people who read Mom as putting on an act that night would probably assume it was deliberately over the top.

(That was George's explanation, relayed in mutters while we were hand-washing the special-occasion dishes that couldn't go in the dishwasher.)

The two of us fled upstairs as soon as the mandatory family viewing of _White Christmas_ ended, freeing us from our family responsibilities until sometime in the vicinity of Oh God O'Clock in the morning. Seeing so many people in close quarters in that ancient movie made even my skin crawl, but at least the Masons didn't insist on filming us as we watched it.

George tried to disappear into her own room immediately. She was radiating misery, just wanting to go to bed and escape the fucking "holiday" for at least a few hours. But what I really wanted was for her day (our day) to end on a better note, and the only way I could think to do it was to show her something I'd been meaning to keep quiet until the next day.

"Come on," I said, and when she dragged her feet, I kinda manhandled her into my bedroom. "Gimme five minutes."

"'Five minutes'," she echoed, voice dripping skepticism. "I'll believe that when I see it. What the hell can't wait?"

Shutting my door behind us, I snatched a card off my dresser. "I have a present for you."

George's frown deepened as she took the card, reading the front of the unsealed envelope. "It says it's for Mom and Dad."

"It's for _you_. Just be careful opening it."

She opened it with meticulous care, so our parents wouldn't know it had been touched, and read the printed text inside. Her expression settled into a cautious blank, waiting for emotion to write itself across her face.

The emotion that came was subtle--a quick gnaw at her lip, a tinge of color in her cheeks--until suddenly it wasn't subtle at all. She flung herself into my arms with a fervor that made me lightheaded.

_(God, I wanted to kiss her--)_

Instead, I wrapped my arms around her, careful to hold her by the upper body, not her hips or the sensitive small of her back, and just hugged her.

The card informed our parents that I'd paid for a three-day/two-night stay at Mom's favorite hotel, for just the two of them. Which meant George and I would be home alone--enticing enough in its own right, but right then, getting Mom out of George's hair for a couple of days was the most valuable thing I could think of. Dealing with each other was more than we had the bandwidth for; dealing with our parents on top of that could be completely hellish.

George sank against me, implicitly trusting me--despite how prickly we'd been with each other all day--to take her weight, and the weight of everything she was carrying around with her...

...including the weight of all our mutual unspoken desire for each other, the desire that made us wrestle and grapple with each other for the excuse to touch but had made simple full-body embraces like this one rare over the past months.

"Thank you," she said. It was muffled against my collarbone, so she tipped her head back and said it again. "Thank you."

"No problem." My voice cracked. I was looking down the lines of her jaw and throat, lines that led my eyes to her mouth and her chest. My room felt like all the air had been sucked out of it, sucked into this taut expectancy that was George in my arms, maybe-offering--or maybe not, because she had to know as well as I did that this would be a really shitty moment for me to kiss her for the first time.

If I kissed her, she'd kiss me back. I was 95 percent sure of that, and maybe 85 percent sure she'd let me do more than that, that she'd undress me as fast as I got her clothes off.

So she was trusting me not to. She was pressed against me like a second skin, so close there was no way she couldn't feel my dick responding to her, trusting me not to do a goddamn thing no matter how much I wanted to or how sure I was that she wanted it too. Because right now she didn't _need_ to be kissed, or--or anything else like that.

What she needed was for her brother to hold her up. So I did.

 

************  
December 2033  
************

Shaun and I have spent every Christmas we can remember together, but the year we were sixteen was the first one that we were _together_. Most of our time was as choreographed as always, but the shift in our relationship--not so much the presence of sex as the absence of awkwardness and tension--made all the difference in the world.

Our parents' stupid holiday "family celebration" lasted even later into Christmas night than it had in years, mainly because the pair of us were in a good enough mood to tolerate it longer. We'd spent the day mostly smiling and saying thank-yous that didn't sound like they were dragged out of us. It also helped that Shaun had been absolutely ridiculous and made fruitcake a month earlier, and he soaked it in so much booze that we knew if our breath smelled like alcohol later, our parents would chalk it up to that, not to the fact that the hot chocolate Shaun made for us was half liquor.

Being slightly drunk didn't change the fact that the whole performance was exhausting. It was a huge relief to finally escape upstairs and shut the door on another vomit-inducing All-American Mason Family Christmas.

I called first dibs on the shower. When I went into my room afterwards, I found Shaun on my bed, still in his hilariously tacky Christmas sweater with its sparkly-nosed reindeer. Things we pretend in the post-Rising world: that Santa's reindeer would be magically immune to Kellis-Amberlee and therefore, somehow, aren't terrifying to look at.

There he was, lying on top of my covers, one arm stuck straight up over his head, holding what looked like a clump of leaves.

"What the hell is that?" I asked, giving my hair one last tousle before dropping my towel over the back of my desk chair. "Snacks for Rudolph?"

"Mistletoe."

I snickered. "Oh, come on. Where would you get _mistletoe_?"

Shaun rolled his eyes and let his arm drop. "Sure, George, say it loud enough that Mom and Dad hear."

"Spare me. They're still downstairs watching _A Christmas Carol_." I sat on the bed beside him and reached out for the unexpected plant.

"I printed it at school, if you _must_ suck all the romance out of it." He squirmed further down the mattress, making room between the top of his head and my headboard, and carefully set the "mistletoe" down above the pillows.

"Is it sucking out the romance to say you're supposed to hang it up?"

"No more than it's missing the obvious if you don't see that it'll be over our heads if you lie down."

He didn't look seriously annoyed, but I decided to stop making fun of the gesture. "Sorry," I said, lying down and nestling against his side. "Mocking romance is kind of my nature."

Shaun said, "I'd noticed. Romance is stupid anyway."

"It is," I agreed. "But kissing is fantastic. So you get tons of points for the seasonal 'shut up and kiss me' signal, if not for subtlety."

"Do 'points' translate into kisses?"

They did. With the mistletoe's blessing, we spent the next hour awarding each other points for everything we could think of--my grade on the chemistry final; Shaun's ability to get my bra off with one hand; our mutual knack for making each other weak in the knees--until, sleepy and drunk on kisses, we fell asleep in a tangle of limbs and blankets.


End file.
